The reading of this film is so often incorrect.

Many like to believe it speaks to the notion that several people can view the same incident and interpret it in different ways through no fault of their own, and the different "interpretations" of the incident speak to human subjectivity.

But that is not what this film is about.

This film is about several people viewing and/or experiencing the same incident and then lying about it to other people because the lie benefits them more than telling the truth. They aren't "misinterpreting" the incident - they are lying about it, and they are doing so on purpose.

Their "interpretation" of the incident is not what they believe, it's what they want…

50/100

Blasphemer! But this just plain isn't the radical exercise in subjectivity that its champions claim. "I've seen so many men getting killed like insects," intones the priest at the outset, "but even I have never heard a story as horrible as this. This time I may finally lose my faith in the human soul." Because people lie for self-serving reasons? Welcome to since ever. The four stories aren't (as some folks implicitly suggest) variant good-faith interpretations of an unknowable event, subject to bias and the vagaries of human perception; these accounts are so radically different that three of the four simply have to be lying through their teeth, and it's fairly clear that the woodcutter's tale, despite his own…

spoilers and possibly triggering topics discussed in the third/fourth paragraph

funny how the movie that's come to be associated with the "rashomon effect" hits harder when you strip the gimmick away. this is a story of bottomless cruelty and cutting selfishness. it's not about good-faith interpretations of a confusing event or how we see the world through different eyes but rather about the self-serving lies of men who have left morality far behind. human beings reconstruct narratives in the way that casts them in the best light, especially when there is not much light to begin with.

what’s horrifying is not that the story told by four different individuals is especially confusing or even terrible but that there’s not a…

There was a moment only a little while into this film when I became aware of a device Kurosawa was using. Each of the four people who speak at the trial face the camera directly. We never hear from the court, and that's because we are the court. At that moment, I got that feeling in the pit of my stomach that cinephiles live for, that "Oh man, this is something truly special" feeling.

I wasn't wrong. In Rashomon, truth isn't just subjective, it's non-existent. It's a revolutionary idea to communicate through cinema, arguably the art form most closely associated with "truth" as we perceive it. I think it was Godard (or maybe Truffaut?) who said, "Cinema is truth 24…

One of my many unwatched classics.

I am going to use the most undeserving word to describe this film, but I can't think of another. Mesmerizing.

It is absolutely amazing how perfect a feat of storytelling this is. There are a lot of present day directors who can learn a lot about how to structure and pace a story. All they have to do is watch this masterpiece.

Kurosawa's plays with perspective, without losing sight of the central story or themes. And there is a lot to digest here. It is so much more than a story about crime told from different perspectives. That, in itself, could have been enough, but this film adds a striking and appealing philosophical depth…